Distortions of the American Dream in Miler's Death of a Salesman and West's The Day of the Locust

Abstract

James Truslow Adams first defined the American Dream as one that would allow everyone, regardless of their origin or social status, to prosper in a place of free and equal opportunity. However, the very idea of the self-made man and the accessibility of a collective dream that anybody who works hard can achieve became intrinsically unattainable following the Great Depression. Afterwards, as capitalist consumerism progressively morphed the idyllic values of the American Dream, the Dream itself developed in ways which were far from the conventional vision of it. This paper argues that Arthur Miller’s most renowned play Death of a Salesman (1949) and Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust (1939) offer the opportunity to explore different distortions stemming from the concept of the ‘original’ American Dream. In this paper, I show how Miller and West’s texts can be examined as articulating the disorientation caused by the inevitable corruption of the original idea of the American Dream. In order to do so, I analyse several narrative elements common to the two texts, achieving an overview of the distortions of the American Dream present in Salesman and Locust. Namely, I examine the values of the ‘original’ American Dream, the conception of right and wrong within the texts, the representation of obsessions in Miller’s play, and the distortion of time and space in both works. As a result, this paper presents how, through the employment of these distortions, Miller and West’s texts highlight the truth of a profoundly fragmented and contradictory America.